Deportation Case Presents Test of British Government

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: May 19, 2010

LONDON -- Britain's new coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats was confronted with an early challenge to its ability to surmount internal political differences on Tuesday, when an immigration appeals commission granted the right to remain in Britain to a 23-year-old Pakistani identified by the panel as an operative of Al Qaeda who posed a ''serious and continuing threat'' to Britain's national security.

The panel's ruling, based on concern that the man might be tortured if he were deported, posed an immediate dilemma for the new government. The Conservative home secretary, Theresa May, said the government would not challenge the ruling. But officials indicated that she was likely to place the individual concerned, and a Pakistani accused of being an accomplice, under so-called control orders, which involve effective house arrest and other restrictions, including a ban on the use of cellphones and severe limitations on whom the person can meet with.

Control orders were put in place by the previous Labour government to deal with other Islamic militants suspected of terrorist involvement but not convicted in court, either for lack of evidence or because of a concern by the authorities not to disclose important intelligence information. But the orders have been bitterly opposed in the past by the Liberal Democrats, now the junior partners in the governing coalition.

Their view, in the words of Nick Clegg, now the deputy prime minister, has been that the orders represent ''a slippery slope'' in the erosion of personal freedoms in Britain. Chris Huhne, another Liberal Democrat now serving in the government as energy minister, has described the orders in the past as ''an affront to British justice.''

Their views are part of a deep commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights, which became law in Britain in 1998, but which the Conservatives, in the election that brought them to power last week, said they would replace with a narrower statute less invasive of the rights of British courts.

Officials in the Home Office, which has many of the powers of the Department of Homeland Security in the United States, said Tuesday that the government would try to bridge the differences by appointing an independent commission to review the use of control orders.

But the fact that the two governing parties have been thrust so quickly into an issue that so starkly exposes differing approaches to a major policy issue has underscored how hard they may find it to reconcile their deep philosophical divide.

The man at the center of the immigration case, Abid Naseer, a student enrolled in a computer course in Liverpool, was one of 11 men, including 10 Pakistanis, who were arrested in April 2009 in one of Britain's most extensive counterterrorism operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

Based on electronic intercepts, including e-mail messages sent by Mr. Naseer to contacts in Pakistan, the police said they believed that the men were within days of mounting a ''mass casualty'' bombing, perhaps at a shopping center.

But the police investigation was severely compromised when the head of Scotland Yard's counterterrorist squad, Bob Quick, was photographed on his way into a meeting at 10 Downing Street clutching a folder with details of the alleged plot, and police plans to foil it. That led to an accelerated series of police raids in Liverpool and Manchester, which found no explosives or other bomb-making equipment.

Eventually, all 11 men arrested were released, with the 10 Pakistanis immediately detained again on national security grounds, and subsequently ordered deported to Pakistan. Eight of the Pakistanis subsequently left the country, but Mr. Naseer and Ahmad Faraz Khan, 23, as well as three others who had already flown back to Pakistan, appealed the deportation orders to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission.

In its ruling on Tuesday, the commission determined that Mr. Naseer was a Qaeda operative who posed a ''serious and continuing threat'' to Britain's national security.

But the judge, John Mitting, also ruled that while deporting Mr. Naseer and Mr. Khan would be ''conducive to the public good,'' Pakistan had ''a long and well-documented history of disappearances, illegal detention, and of the torture and ill-treatment of those detained, usually to produce information, confession or compliance.'' That meant, he said, that deporting the two men would be a breach of the provision in the European rights convention banning torture.

The ruling touched on an issue that has also troubled American officials in dealing with Pakistan on counterterrorism cases. But for Britain, the problem is especially difficult. Security officials here have said that three-quarters of all the terrorist plots they have uncovered since Sept. 11 have involved links to Afghanistan and Pakistan, imposing on them the need for intensive counterterrorism operations aimed at the Pakistani diaspora in Britain, which accounts for about two-thirds of Britain's population of at least 1.5 million Muslims.